Zuckerberg's big global Internet access idea needs to be bigger

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced a partnership called Internet.org designed to deliver Internet access to the billions of people around the globe.

Whether it's born out of noble intentions to create a more equitable world or simply to expand Facebook's addressable market, I'll leave others to debate. The initiative is noteworthy because it raises some important issues about the way the Internet potentially divides us socially and economically, a subject that all too rarely gets discussed.

It's an ambitious idea. But it's likely to fall well short of its goals for the simple reason that it fails to recognize the complexity of reasons that people don't use the Internet.

Zuckerberg's plan focuses on the technical and financial challenges that limit access to the Internet. The problem is that access is not the only thing that stops people from using the Internet.

Just look at the U.S. Given affordable access, many millions of people in the U.S. still opt not to use the Internet. And the reasons are far harder to fix because they have to do with race, class and education.

This is a subject I've written a fair bit about in recent years, following the unveiling by the Federal Communications Commission of its National Broadband Plan in 2010. I interviewed then FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski several times about lessons he was learning about broadband adoption.

"To get where we want to be, we need to think about the connectivity, but also the applications and the devices and the incentives to use it," Genachowski said in 2011. "If you focus on any one of those, it won't work. There's no single challenge. They don't lend themselves to pushing a button and saying that works."

While Genachowski was talking about broadband adoption, he could just as well have been talking about Internet adoption.

At first glance, it's not clear that Zuckerberg has recognized all of these challenges in the plan he announced late Monday night.

His new organization, Internet.org, is a partnership between Facebook and Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung. The goal of the group is to bring Internet access to "the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected, and to bring the same opportunities to everyone that the connected third of the world has today."

Zuckerberg, in a white paper, rightly points out that simply left to market forces, the march of progress would be painfully slow.

"Today, only 2.7 billion people — a little more than one-third of the world’s population — have Internet access," Zuckerberg writes. "Even more surprising, Internet adoption is growing by less than 9% each year, which is slow considering how early we are in its development and that it is expected to slow further."

So far, so good.

His paper then goes on to lay out a general strategy for dramatically lowering the cost of Internet access to make it more widely available. This includes making data centers more efficient, boosting existing wireless signals, and making apps that use less data. Other people, with greater technical chops than me, would be better placed to discuss how sensible those strategies are.

Though one of part of the plan is certainly worth noting: Part of the strategy calls for narrowly defining which "basic Internet services" should be available for free and which ones (for example, video streaming) ought to require a paid plan. Sorting out those definitions should make for a fun food fight.

Still, let's assume the group reaches a consensus definition and that eventually Internet access becomes far more readily available to billions of people. It's here that Zuckerberg's vision falls short.

"Even when they can afford it, many people who have never experienced the Internet don't know what a data plan is or why they'd want one," Zuckerberg says. "However, most people have heard of services like Facebook and messaging and they want access to them. If we can provide people with access to these services, then they’ll discover other content they want and begin to use and understand the broader Internet."

Not necessarily true. This is a kind of build-it-and-they-will come philosophy that Genachowski and the FCC learned in recent years does not bridge the digital divide.